Coney Island Baby, shot last August in Sligo, is the story of ayoung man who returns to Ireland from New York to discover the girl he had never been able to get out of his mind is now pregnant. Written by Karl Geary, who also plays the lead role this was the most personal project he has done so far in a career that is rapidly gaining momentum. "At sixteen I left Dublin for the US. I went into the heart of the East Village, where it was incredibly vibrant. A few years later I came back to write this novel, it didn't make a very good book, but I knew it had some good elements especially the dialogue."

"I discovered a Coney Island out there in Sligo. The name came from the word conin, Irish for rabbit, because the place is full of rabbits. l think some Irish guy who went to America gave the other Coney Island its name because it reminded him of home,” he says explaining the title. After landing a part in Michael Almereyda's Nadja, produced by Amy Hobby, Geary turned his novel into a screenplay and teamed up with Hobby in the search for a director and funding, "We looked at a lot of talented people at Sundance and other festivals, but it occurred to me that I already had a good working relationship with Amy, and I knew she would be totally unsentimental about Ireland. Amy was brought up in suburban Florida and the world she knew best was shopping malls and parking lots. That was the world my characters were from even though it was in Ireland. Amy also had a photography background so I trusted her visual aesthetic."

"If you're in the loop you're in the loop." Says Geary, critical of the reception he got from the Irish Film Board, "They suffer from the same disease as RTE. If someone else shows an interestor if something goes well they'll jump on board. But they support the same people over and again. People we'd approached eventuallycame back in from the cold and gave us the money. I knew that afterthat I could approach people here but at that stage l didn't need them." With a budget of $150,000 the decision was made to shoot the film on DV.

When it became obvious that the only way the film was going to get made was on digital video, I sat down with Karl to address what this meant for my personal storytelling experience." Says director Amy Hobby. "Basically, I sat down and got myself jazzed about the LoFi experience. I carefully assessed what tools I did and didn't have. For example, depth of field is not a strength of video, so l ruled out telling the story by racking focus or byisolating somebody psychologically through having the backgroundout of focus. I wasn't a fan of how static shots looked in video, so I started thinking in terms of blocking to keep my actors movingin the frame and ways to move the camera. I felt that with DV my notions of how to create a sense of place would be defined by thepeople who inhabited it. This reinforced the importance of castingand rehearsal."

"The colour palette I had originally imagined shifted when we decided to shoot in digital video. After looking at plenty of DV, both projected in video and transferred to film, I found a range of colours that I liked and thought worked on video - brown and more brown, wood panelling, nicotine-stained walls and tea stained T-shirts. And avoidance of all red! I found shooting on DV a generally positive experience compared to shooting on film. Becauseof its lower key nature I got to shoot in awesome locations like at an airport (Knock International), on an abandoned Russian ship and at the Sligo races. I could also take the camera and do some shots myself. I could never do this if we were shooting on 35mm.I could also take second unit shots of clouds or birds flying over the water without feeling we were wasting precious film."

"The shoot also gained impact inevitably because the camera could be running at a moment's notice and due to the brilliance of my actors and the unobtrusive size of the camera. For example we were shooting a scene where the character Mr. Hayes (played by Tom Hickey) was selling toilet accessories door to door in a small housing estate. We were shooting in one particular doorway when somebody came down from upstairs and started to get very interested m the coloured bathmats. I think Tom had sold all four of them by the time we stopped rolling the camera. This sort of thing adds a real texture to shots and films that is much more difficult to get with a bigger crew and a more formalised way of working."

There were also drawbacks of course. We used a Century Precision optics 'anamorphic adapter' which is more accurately a 16:9 converter. Placed on the front of the zoom lens of the Sony PD-150,it increases the sharpness of the image about 20% when the video is transferred to film. What I didn't realise was that the second (longer) half of the zoom lens couldn't be used with the adapter because you would lose focus. This became problematic in what I call the watching and waiting scene. The character Billy is parked across the road from his ex-girlfriend's place of work. The POV shots became a nightmare. It was impossible to create that psychology of watching from afar without the use of the longer lens. Peter agreed to take off the adapter to do these shots after much grumpiness from me because I felt it was the only way to tell the story. Unfortunately these shots will look 20% less sharp than the rest of the sequence."

LET THERE BE LOTS OF LIGHT

As a first time feature director. Amy Hobby could hardly have donebetter than having cinematographer Peter Deming, a long time collaborator with David Lynch, by her side. "Working on a new format was something I was hoping to do eventually, and it was primarily through my association with Amy that I got involved with this project she's been a good friend of mine for ten years and I wanted to be part of her first directorial effort." Deming found a number of positive aspects regarding his work on Coney Island Baby, "I enjoyed very much working with Amy and Karl. And shooting in Sligo was different in that it seemed the area had not been used a great deal for filming, so the locations were fresh and the people were receptive to our presence. It was interesting to work on a smaller scale project because everything was much more immediate. There is a very small chain of command and ifyou wanted something done you'd do it yourself." Locating in Sligo was in Geary's opinion probably part of the attraction for someone like Peter Deming. "If we'd been just another low budgetmovie shot in New York or even Dublin, he may not have been so interested."

"The thing that made everything work was that we were lucky enough to strike the right balance between people at the top of their game and a load of people who worked to get the experience. There were a lot of firsts and that made things interesting. It was my first time as writer, Amy's first time directing and Peter's first time to shoot on digital." Hobby also responded very positively to working in Ireland after years working in New York and L.A. "I found shooting in Sligo to be one of the warmest and most wonderful filmmaking experiences I've had. The people who owned my B&B (Timmy and Vanessa) were constantly giving me locations tips over breakfast, or showing up on set to act in a scene. We had a handful of local Irish crew people who worked for no money (Thank you all!) I have no idea if it would be the same working in Dublin or if we were shooting a much bigger film in the same locations.

Peter Deming is reluctant to give a final verdict on the DV/film question from his perspective just yet. "Since l haven't seen the result of the completed process (transferring from tape onto film) I can't completely say how I feel about the DV experience. But the big thing I found out was that the notion that this format requires little or no lighting I can say is not true. In my opinion, you need as much if not more than when you're working on film."Now that it's all over Karl Geary is less concerned with how the film does than with the fact that after years of hard work he has realised the long held ambition of getting his film made. When production began he admits he found it difficult to step back and concentrate on the acting. "Obviously as the writer you see the story a certain way but I didn't want to ask Amy to direct and then get in her way. She had to tell her story from my script, and my job was to interpret her vision of my character based on the feeling she got from my script. Then again," he adds, "there were forty two speaking roles and we shot it all in eighteen days so I had enough to worry about trying to get everyone to turn up on time."